Sonicrampage

Yesterday I received a message on BangingTunes.com from a user named Hettoblaster complimenting me on the Heartcore mix, and pointing me towards Mark Reeder’s Myspace page. Mark Reeder, for those who don’t know (a group that included me until yesterday evening!), is an Englishman who moved to Berlin back in the 1970’s and went on to become one of the key figures in the development of trance music, establishing the MFS (“Masterminded For Success”) label back in 1991. Through MFS, Mark launched the careers of people like Cosmic Baby and Paul van Dyk, who was later to become one of the biggest dj’s in the world, as well as putting out releases by producers such as Humate, Marco Zaffarano, and Mijk van Dijk.

Anyways, on his MySpace page, Mark has written a very long and interesting piece about his experiences in the Berlin music scene from the 1970’s through to today, which has a lot of fascinating detail about the latter part of the Cold War. It’s well worth going over there to have a read through the whole thing, but as a teaser I thought that I would excerpt what Mark has to say about the development of trance music and his relationship with Paul van Dyk:

If you’ve enjoyed my recent dubstep tributes, you should definitely check out Laurent Fintoni’s epic DMZ tribute that he did for his Saw You On The Flipside blog back in April. It’s got almost every classic tune that you might want from dubstep overlords Mala, Coki, and Loefah, spliced together with some audio from the YouTube interviews the crew did with Scion Radio. Amazing.

As regular readers of this blog will probably know, I am a big fan of photography. I usually use my own photographs for the mix covers, and I have posted entire galleries of pictures to accompany my mixes Drifter and Summer Snapshot.

One of my other interests is social media, a topic on which I write a blog at RandallHelms.com. In particular, I am very interested in ‘social sourcing’, how people can use the different forms of social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc) to create and share content.

This being the case, I thought that it might be interesting to combine my three passions (music, photography, and social media) into one little project. Among my forthcoming mix projects is a mix entitled Cold World, which, as I described here, will be a selection of some of my favourite tunes from the mid-90’s wave of darkside drum n’ bass. Since that music was so dark and so cold, it seems to me that a great way to accompany the mix would be to post a gallery of winter photographs.

This is where you come in.

Are you an amateur photographer?

If so, I’d like to hear from you!

What I’m looking for is your favourite winter photograph (that you took, of course), as well as some kind of description. This could be anything from just where you took it to a couple of paragraphs telling the story behind the picture, or why it’s your favourite winter picture.

Interested?

Great! Please email the image (the higher-resolution the better), the description, your name, and your website (if you have one) to me at pearsall@gmail.com, making sure to include the words ‘Cold World’ somewhere in the subject field. Having received your photo, I will then be more than happy to include it in the post that will accompany the Cold World mix.

I look forward to hearing from you!

In the meantime, I’ve recorded a tribute to dubstep don Skream, which will be live on the site tomorrow.

New mixes soon!

In my last post I mentioned that I was planning on doing a Skream tribute mix this week; unfortunately, I am so busy for the next few weeks that I won’t really be able to do a mix until October. To compensate, however, I thought I might point you in the direction of four dubstep mixes that I have enjoyed recently. I’ve also included links to cue files so that you can split the mixes into individual tracks using CueSplitter.

Enjoy!

OK, I got back from California a few days ago, and will be hopefully putting together a new mix or two very shortly. I was thinking of doing a Skream tribute mix (since he’s my favourite producer of the last couple years, and he’s involved in two new albums at the moment) – any thoughts, anyone? Or should I do ‘Cold World’, my old skool techstep mix, first?

In the meantime, for those of you who enjoyed Hang Ten, you might be interested in an interview that Matty G recently did with MTV UK. An excerpt:

TWU: Your music seems to have a very minimal and simplistic approach, but very effective and bass influenced. Do you think you’ve found the best formula to writing dubstep? Wouldn’t you like to mix things up with maybe more vocals, synths etc?

Matty G: I do love the minimal approach. Part of that is by choice, but also out of necessity. I really fell in love with early dubstep, which was very minimal, so I’ve kinda held on to that style by choice. For a long time though, regardless of what I wanted to do, I was limited by the equipment I used, most of my releases were produced on an old iMac G3 in OS 9, for all the nerds out there [laughs]. It wasn’t really able to run synths, so most of my tunes are sample based, which has helped shape my style. I’ve since upgraded and have begun to incorporate more instrumentation, but still like to keep it minimal and rely on samples for the meat of the tune. As for vocals, I had quite a few vocal tracks on my album ‘Take You Back’ and I have to say, mixing them down was the most difficult task I’ve undertaken as a producer. I would like to continue working with vocalists, but have been on more of the instrumental tip lately.

TWU: Who would you consider your main influences in writing music?

Matty G: Wow! That’s a tough one [laughs]. There’s so many that cross a wide spectrum of styles. I’m a huge fan of old soul, R&B and reggae and each of these genres has multiple producers I admire. Lee Perry, King Tubby, Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Phil Spector, James Brown, they all have influenced me in different ways. As far as hip-hop, I would say the founding members of NWA, especially Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, those are the most obvious and it almost sounds cheesy, but kids were bumping the hell out of ‘The Chronic’ and ‘Predator’ when I was growing up. I definitely got mad love for the East Coast too though, Wu-Tang and Mobb Deep taught me that beats can be minimal, dirty and still be bangin’. Early Ed Rush and Trace back in the ‘No U Turn’ and ‘Lucky Spin’ days, that is what I draw a lot of my electronic influence from. They used quite a few hip-hop samples themselves and created a musical vibe that was just straight up dark.

A few days ago I mentioned that I will be hosting a number of guest mixes in the coming months. One of them will be by Brisbane’s Tyssen, an old mate, who will be contributing a tribute to Pendragon, one of London’s most legendary hard trance parties. Until then, however, be sure to check out the great tribute to Dynamic Intervention that he posted to Bangingtunes over the weekend. If you were a fan of my hard house tribute mixes, this should be right up your street!